More Hotel Shenanigans

Taking a look at the hotel bookings my eye was drawn to one in Germany. When I'd first booked it, it had some ridiculous price quoted, because the lady at Booking.com told me, they hadn't finalised the room price. She told me the correct price would be, a hefty £70 each. Now looking down the list, as I said my eye was drawn to that figure and so I decided to see if there was any way to get the price down. Hey presto! I was able to book 4 more rooms, this time at £40, which is much more like it and cancel the original booking. It doesn't always pay to jump in early but you can't blame me, given quite a number of the hotels I'd originally identified, were fully booked before I even got a sniff of them on B.com. Anyway, all's well..... I double checked the other hotels too but they were still the price as originally booked.

Moving on, and looking at the itinerary, I was trying to get some idea of what train we would need to catch on that first morning. So, working back from our various stops, I have determined that we shall need to be on the 8:20, which pretty much means a 6:30 start for me, picking the Hogs up at 6:45 for the run to Le Tunnel.

During this exercise I was checking the opening times and cost of the Hill 62 trenches, our first stop on the other side. It was at this point that I came across and read some reviews on Trip Advisor. I can normally take these with a pinch of salt, for every good review, someone will hate the same thing. Here though, I was finding bad review after bad review. It seems that the place is a bit of a rip-off and not very well looked after. It was hard to ignore the number of very similar reviews, so I decided to have another look round and came across some German trenches instead, that seem altogether better looked after and even take a few miles off the day's riding. I have, therefore, re-routed us to visit these instead.

Moving on to the second day, we have a visit to the Maginot Line fort at Hackenberg. Least that was the plan. Reading the website though, it wasn't entirely clear if the place was open outside of the weekend. With us arriving on a Monday, that could be a massive planning faux pas. Clarification was needed and so I emailed the address on the website and asked them when they are open. The answer came back today that they will be open on the Monday in question, from 14:30. I'm still not clear if that is the opening time or the time for a guided tour, as those are mentioned on the website but for now I'm happy that the plan stands and my planned timings should see us arrive by 14:00.

I'll be undertaking a similar exercise for the other places we plan to visit. There's little point in arriving at a venue shortly before it closes, if getting on the road an hour earlier would make all the difference, so it's a worthwhile exercise in my book. I know the Hogs will be happy with whatever I decide. They are just grateful it is me doing all this and all they have to do is turn up and ride.....Oh and pay of course!

Less than 300 days now. It'll soon pass!

Hotel Madness

So for a while there, I had three separate hotels booked for the same nights and was looking at a fourth!  I think I must be addicted to Booking.com!

Cath put me onto one along New Road in Chatham, which seems to tick all the boxes pretty much. It is cheaper than one near me and although two quid per room, per night more than the Premier Inn, comes with a full English brekkie. Not only is it closer to my place than the afore mentioned Premier Inn but is also in walking distance of Cath's but more importantly, the venue for our pre tour welcome dinner. For that I am planning to hit a Chinese 'eat as much as you like' venue. The food is all cooked to order there and the service is very good too, all for fifteen quid. If we are lucky we may get some Saturday night entertainment thrown in too. Like most of this stuff, that though is a long way off and I expect some of you are wondering why I am writing all this with 300 days still to go. You may have a point! Things will probably go fairly quiet over the winter though, so you should make sure you enjoy every morsel while you can.

I digress, I'm not finished with hotels yet.  As I booked the one in Chatham, I cancelled the expensive one near me. And then I had a thought. One of those I'd booked in Germany was quite expensive. I wondered if it might be any cheaper now. Ha,ha!  Cheaper, each room was thirty quid cheaper, so I hastily booked another four rooms and cancelled the existing booking. The Hogs will thank me for that, more money for some tasty weissbier!!

I might take a look at some of the others too, though maybe I should concentrate on something else for a while. We'll see ;-)

Re-routed

OK, I've completed the review of the route and re-jigged fuel stops where necessary. The upshot is, there are only 2, maybe 3 days when we shall have to jump on some multi lane roads, days when we have somewhere to visit, so can't afford to dawdle. Even then, I think they are ones in France, that are only 2 lane. In fact, the widest road we'll be on will be the M20 on the run to/from the channel tunnel, before we even get on the continent. 

In mileage, I think there is an extra 30-40 on the twisty stuff. Time wise though, we are looking at an additional 25 hours riding time, over the entire tour. I must say though, now I've had a closer look, some of those roads should be a real hoot to ride on and so long as the sun is shining, who cares if it takes a little longer. We can always get Tomtom to re-route us if we feel the need to speed up anyway.

In undertaking this little exercise, I've managed to pull us away from service station fuel and, in France particularly, steer us towards supermarket fuel. That should save us a few euros over the course of a few fill-ups and leave us more towards our own liquid intake ;-)

I've also booked some hotel rooms for before and after the tour, at the moment too many, of differing quality and cost. Better to have these things sorted early, even though leaving it later and not paying the cancellation premium, would save money. Once things are a bit more firmed up and by that I mean the numbers of Hogs travelling, I can maybe look to cut the costs a bit more.

I did it M way

OK, I've revisited the routes briefly The TYRE software only has a global setting for avoiding motorways so I've had to toggle that off and on to see the affect on mileage and duration. No surprise on timings, one is amost double but some mileages are actually less.

Further investigation required but I don't think we'll have any major issues or replanning.